Centre for Civic Education (CCE) and Konrad Adenauer Stiftung have published “Parliamentary Elections in Montenegro – Election Programes of Parties and Coalitions 2020” which brings the integrated official election programmes of all actors who participated in the parliamentary elections held on 30 August 2020.

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On the occasion of the announcement that the MP of the Democratic Front Jovan Vučurović will be nominated for the President of the Committee for Human Rights and Freedoms of the Parliament of Montenegro, the Centre for Civic Education (CCE) and Human Rights Action (HRA) indicate that such an appointment would annul the purpose of this Parliamentary Committee and call on the MPs to find another personnel solution.

CCE and HRA remind that Vučurović is a politician who has not demonstrated an understanding of the modern concept of human rights in his engagement so far. His statements particularly raise concerns and can be a serious obstacle to the necessary process of dealing with the past and inclusion of certain vulnerable social groups. His appointment to this position would call into question the Parliament’s commitment to democratization, but also the process of Montenegro’s accession to the European Union.

In the Parliament of Montenegro, during the debate on the expose of the new Prime Minister, MP Jovan Vučurović denied the genocide in Srebrenica, claimed that ‘Montenegrins do not exist’ and in some of his earlier speeches spoke disparagingly about one of the most marginalized social groups – the LGBT population. These standpoints do not recommend him for performing the function of the President of the Committee on Human Rights and Freedoms. »

Daily “Dan”
Mr Nikola Marković,
Deputy Editor in Chief

Podgorica, 16/12/2020

Subject: REACTION TO THE TEXT “PROJECTS ARE DEFENDED BY FALSE STATEMENTS”

Dear Mr Marković,

On 8 December 2020, in Dan, a journalist with the initials M. S. published an article entitled “Projects are defended by false statements”.

The text published the statement of the director of the Association of War Veterans of the 1990s from Montenegro, Radan Nikolić, who claims that in a press release, published on 6 December 2020, we published false information that members of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), during the heaviest shelling of the old city of Dubrovnik on 6 December 1991, “killed 19 and wounded 60 people”.

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Centre for Civic Education (CCE) sent today to the Prime Minister, Zdravko Krivokapic, and the competent Minister, the Initiative for conducting an external audit of the University of Montenegro (UoM) for the period from 2017 to 2020.

This Initiative follows the earlier appeals of the CCE to the executive power to, within its competencies, influence the improvement of transparency of work and responsibility in financial management at the UoM, which the previous government persistently ignored. For more than a decade, the CCE has pointed out the inadequacies in the work of UoM, and part of that also refers to discrepancies in the invested funds, control of the way of spending and accompanying results. Never were more funds invested in UoM, but the interested public remains deprived of meaningful information on how those funds are spent. In the last three years alone, about 60 million euros have been paid from the Budget to the account of UoM, and there has been no independent assessment of the legality and efficiency of spending these funds. This increased budgetary investment is not accompanied by a good positioning of UoM on the relevant rankings that assess through different aspects universities around the world. Part of the CCE findings was summarised in the short analysis “Financial Alchemy of the University of Montenegro – an Insight into the Financing of UoM from 2015 to 2019″, which was published in June 2020. »